Sad Day

Things were going along fairly well today. I finally finished one Big Black Sock for Socks for Soldiers. I made a men's large (shoe size 11 - 12), and weighed the sock when I finished it -- a whopping 96 grams! It's sportweight yarn, but still.... So I now have a guideline for winding the rest of that ginormous 2 lb. 13 oz. skein into manageable chunks.



It took me most of the morning, but I now have 11 100g center-pull balls of black sportweight yarn, and the twelfth one is 128g. I did some calculations, and figured I could get 13 1/3 socks out of the whole skein, but since 1 1/3 socks wouldn't do much good (I'm knitting for people who still have both feet, after all), I rounded up and made 100g balls.




Wouldn't want to have made 96g balls & found myself a few feet short of making a sock to match the first one. I had to drape the yarn over the back of a chair, and unwind it a loop at a time. It completely overwhelmed my swift -- there was no way to put that much yarn on that poor little swift. I put a piece of paper around the center of my ball winder, so I could take the ball off occasionally to weigh it, and put it back on if necessary (the paper tube keeps the center open). Most of the time I was a few grams over when I took the ball off, but a few times I had to put it back on. I weighed them on my handy-dandy digital kitchen scale. I have a love/hate relationship with this thing. It's great for measuring yarn weights, and occasionally even food. But the thing eats batteries, and it uses 9V batteries. Anyone else hate 9V batteries? Is it just me?
So I finished winding, went to run a few errands, stopped in our storage building on the way home to find some accessories for the Princess, who is attending a '60s-themed party at her sorority in a couple of weeks. Our Kai dog went with me (this is a building across the field from our house -- remember, we live on a farm). I found what I was looking for and headed back to the house, with the dog running alongside the vehicle. Then I lost sight of her, and then thump, bump. Oh, no... I stopped, saw her trying to run toward the house with one leg held off the ground, yelping. I went to the house, got the phone book so I could call the vet, put a mattress pad in the back of the vehicle, and went back out there, and she was lying very still. Not breathing. So sorry... why didn't I stop when I didn't know where she was?